The Board of IIT Directors has mooted a proposal to allow “bright” students from National Institute of Technology (NIT) to finish their final year from an IIT and continue to study to receive doctorate from IIT. If cleared, the facility will pave a way for lateral entry for “eligible” NIT students into IIT, as an alternate way to clearing JEE Advanced, the newly proposed entrance examination to the coveted IITs. The proposal is about to be discussed in the meeting of the Standing Committee headed by HRD minister M M Pallam Raju, on January 7, the reliable sources said.

The move is expected to boost the count of doctoral fellows in IITs. The proposal is actually an outcome of a suggestion made in the Anil Kakodkar Committee report titled ‘Taking IITs to Excellence and Greater Relevance’ released in April 2011.

Kakodkar suggested that while intense efforts had been proposed to attract IIT grads into the PhD program, it was also necessary to attract students from other top engineering schools. “The NITs, along with some of the better engineering education institutions, should become important feeders of quality graduates into post-graduate and research programs, including at the IITs,” the report said.

The Kakodkar report recommends that the IITs should aim to take in 2,500 doctorate-seekers every year. The bigger idea is to scale up the count of PhD students from less than 1,000 per year now to 10,000 by 2020-25.

Under the scheme, the IITs will identify bright students in NITs and other equivalent technical institutes with a consistently outstanding performance in the first three years of their engineering course, look at recommendations from their teachers and evaluate their research potential through an interview, for to be directly admitted to the final year of BTech programs in IITs. Such students will complete their B Tech program as well as their PhD in about five years from then onwards. The graduate degree could be awarded by the institute they came from and the PhD in due course by IIT.